Jerold C. Frakes

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Jerold C. Frakes is a professor of English at the University at Buffalo. His research is in the field of medieval European literatures, especially German, Latin, Norse, and Yiddish.

Frakes’s current research focuses on the emergence of Yiddish literature in the late medieval period. As radical social, demographic, economic, and political upheaval transformed Ashkenazic Jewish society, new genres and forms of literary and cultural expression developed.

Frakes has written four books about the literature of medieval and early modern Europe, including Brides and Doom: Gender, Property, and Power in Medieval German Women’s Epic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994) and Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and has edited or translated nine other books. He has received fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. Frakes earned master’s degrees from Memphis State University and the University of Minnesota and a doctoral degree in Germanic philology from the University of Minnesota.